Page:Vindication Women's Rights (Wollstonecraft).djvu/88

82 character than by giving a man abolute power. This argument branches into various ramifications.—Birth, riches, and every extrinic advantage that exalt a man above his fellows, without any mental exertion, ink him in reality below them. In proportion to his weaknes, he is played upon by deigning men, till the bloated monter has lot all traces of humanity. And that tribes of men, like flocks of heep, hould quietly follow uch a leader, is a olecim that only a deire of preent enjoyment and narrownes of undertanding can olve. Educated in lavih dependence, and enervated by luxury and loth, where hall we find men who will tand forth to aert the rights of man;—or claim the privilege of moral beings, who hould have but one road to excellence? Slavery to monarchs and miniters, which the world will be long in freeing itelf from, and whoe deadly grap top the progres of the human mind, is not yet abolihed.

Let not men then in the pride of power, ue the ame arguments that tyrannic kings and venal miniters have ued, and fallaciouly aert that woman ought to be ubjected becaue he has always been o.—But, when man, governed by reaonable laws, enjoys his natural freedom, let him depie woman, if he do not hare it with him; and till that glorious period arrives, in decanting on the folly of the ex, let him not overlook his own.

Women, it is true, obtaining power by unjut means, by practiing or fotering vice, evidently loe the rank which reaon would aign them, and they become&ensp;